Gearing Up For Launch - Beta Ready

After 5 years of hard work in PHP4 and 5, starting in MySQL and moving to PostgreSQL, scrapping and rewriting 3 times, doing lots of end user testing and comment collection, and further polish, my CRM-lite workgroup management project is done. Hurray for me and my very patient wife and children!

Some may say why did I make my software in the Cathedral model instead of the Bazaar model, but my answer is the Steve Jobs answer -- sometimes you have to build it your way so that others see your vision. Later on, I can enhance it with the Bazaar model.

So now I'm working on Libervis.com to iron out how this FSF, GNU, GPL stuff works as far as license, copyright, trademark, and any other advice, and I'm gearing up for an LLC that perhaps I can get ready for the web by June 2007 or sooner.

I have a little suggestion in terms of the DB-backend, I've written a class that supports MySQL, PgSQL and MSSQL, including translation of the SQL-dialect to fit the targeted DB. It's far from perfect yet, but if you don't have some crazy queries it might work for you.
Maybe you'd like to have a look, it's written for PHP5, but there's also a backport to PHP4.
You can find it, amongst other classes, on my Sourceforge-project PHP Class Collection.

I'll have to keep that in mind on my next project. With this project, it seems that I had to do things that only particularly work in PostgreSQL, even when I tried to avoid that. However, I created a DB class and a SQL statement file that I can swap out in order to convert to MySQL, so it's not going to be very hard for someone to do when they use it. I'm just so tired now after building this thing after 5 years of hard work that I'm not ready to consider all the nuances of customization yet. Besides, I want to charge for my labor to customize the code -- consulting is the business model.

Well, of course my class would require quite some reworking of the code, since you'll have to change all the handling to use that class. To make it easier it could be possible to use a wrapper-class, so you could still use your code which anyway uses a class already.
But of course this will still need work and time, and of course testing.

As said, the class for sure isn't perfect yet, but I incorporated it into my website and it seems to work fine.

By the way, you're pretty free with the class, you could even incorporate it into closed-source code since I chose the LGPL as license, which isn't that infective as the GPL is.